The Fayetteville Public Library is considering the purchase of the old City Hospital that closed last year, and they could get final approval on Monday night. The hospital shut down because of how beaten up the building had become, 40/29's Ben Wagner reported.

The Fayetteville Public Library Board of Trustees meeting started at 5:30 p.m.

Sinan Gul, an international student, and his son are regular visitors to the library. He brings his son to classes the library offers.

"You meet people here that have their kids here and that become a big opportunity to meet people in the community," he said.

Recently, the classes are the areas in the library are getting too full.

"Because it's crowded, you have to wait or you have to skip it," Gul said.

"We are simply running out of room," said David Johnson of the Fayetteville Public Library.

Johnson said this is the main reason the library hopes to expand across the street. The expansion would give the library more room to house its collection, which is rapidly outgrowing the current space.

"Even these bins, in terms of just collection size, we're having a hard time fitting them all into the space," he said.

If the library wins the bidding war with an expected price tag of about $ 2 million, the library's property would double in size. But the hospital building itself, now a faded memory overgrown by weeds and tattered signs, would come down.

"(They need to think about) what they're going to need, not just now, but thinking 20 years down the road when the city gets to a population of 115,000," Johnson said. "What is our library going to be able to provide those citizens?"

“It’s our favorite place, and we’d really love to see it expand and improve," Gul said.

The library's executive director told Wagner that they plan to build a skyway from the existing building to a new building across the street. He said addition would take at least four years to build, and plans have not been completed.